Influence of coda stop features on perceived vowel duration

A perceptual pathway for voicing-conditioned vowel duration

“…Several of these vowel characteristics have been linked to perceived duration, which could then produce a relationship between coda voicing and vowel duration. If coda voicing influences acoustic characteristics within the preceding vowel and these characteristics influence the perceived duration of vowels, vowels produced before voiced codas may sound longer than vowels produced before voiceless codas, as was found by Sanker (2019b). If listeners then interpret these distinct perceived durations in each environment as reflecting the intended duration, they could develop a phonological representation in which vowels are longer before voiced codas than before voiceless codas.…”

“…Such misperception would predict that vowels should be longer before sonorants, which are acoustically more similar to vowels, than before obstruents; however, such a difference in duration is not observed (House & Fairbanks, 1953;Umeda, 1975). If listeners misperceive coda voicing as part of the vowel, then adding periodic noise to the end of a vowel without adding any other cues for the presence of a coda should increase the perceived duration of the vowel; however, Sanker (2019b) finds an inconsistent effect of such spliced endings on perceived vowel duration.…”

“…Similarly, listeners seem to compensate for expected vowel duration in a given coda environment. Because longer vowels are expected before voiced codas, listeners are more likely to identify vowels as short in this environment (Sanker, 2019b); however, that study used vowels with their naturally produced codas, which leaves some uncertainty about the respective contributions of the voicing of the coda presented with the vowel and the coda originally produced with the vowel.…”

“…However, Fowler (1992) found that longer stop closures increased listeners' perceived duration of preceding vowels, rather than decreasing it. Sanker's (2019b) finding that vowels are more likely to be perceived as long when they have a voiceless coda may help account for this result; longer closures increase listeners' perception that the coda is voiceless (Port & Dalby, 1982), and listeners compensate for the duration expected in the given coda environment. Javkin (1976) proposes that voicing-conditioned vowel duration arises from misperception of the boundary between vowels and following voiced consonants, with periodic noise in the coda interpreted as part of the vowel.…”

Physical and phonological causes of coda /t/ glottalization in the mainstream American English of central Ohio

“…Any such predictions, however, crucially depend on the function of particular phonetic cues in a particular language variety, and will differ in other varieties (Cohen Priva, 2017;Docherty & Foulkes, 1999b). Before making any perception-based predictions, it is important to determine how a specific group of listeners use coda glottalization and other laryngeal articulations (Chong & Garellek, 2018;Penney, Cox, Miles, & Palethorpe, 2018;Penney, Cox, & Szakay, 2020;Sanker, 2019) and what expectations talkers have about their listeners' perception.…”